In 2016, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer were working separately in Chicago’s flourishing avant-jazz scene when both were tapped to participate in a performance of Terry Riley’s “In C” hosted by the Bitchin Bajas. A foundational work in American minimalism, “In C” consists of 53 “melodic patterns” played in sequence, with the catch that each player decides how many times they’d like to repeat a fragment before moving on to the next; no two versions are ever exactly the same. The meeting—and the piece—proved auspicious for the music Chiu and Honer would go on to create together. For their third full-length collaboration, the analog synth whiz and violist grappled with the age-old question of how to capture chance in a static piece of recorded music. Different Rooms is a carefully calibrated bricolage of live spontaneity and studio craft, bridged by two artists’ shared passions for process, collaboration, and the beauty of the mundane.
One of Chiu and Honer’s first joint ventures was a trip to the Baltic Sea, which they documented in the sweeping expanses of 2022’s Recordings from the Åland Islands. Different Rooms plays it closer to home. A short film accompanying the album’s release renders such majestic tableaus as a washing machine, a fogged train window, and water flowing from a calcified faucet. In place of far-flung field recordings, Chiu and Honer have gathered the sounds we hear throughout our daily lives and within our own homes. Wind chimes jingle on “Long and Short Delays” and “One of Eight,” and ice cubes are unmistakably dropped in a glass midway through the title track. Opener “Mean Solar Time” could replace Squarepusher’s “Tommib” in Lost in Translation as Scarlett Johansson studies the rhythms of downtown Manhattan from her hotel window, the staccato modal pulse gradually yielding to the ambiance of an empty train platform.
Having departed from its predecessor’s Nordic terroir, Different Rooms nonetheless arrives coated in frost. “Long and Short Delays” might be a long-lost cousin of Biosphere’s glacial, sonar-deep opus Substrata, left buried for decades under Arctic ice. Honer’s patient bowing opens up pockets of breathable air amid Chiu’s murky keyboards. One of two longer suites that make up the record’s midsection, “Before and After Signs” passes two nebulous minutes before reaching some semblance of structure via a grounding bass refrain. Plucked strings, frigid organ lines, glassy piano, and garbled radio transmissions (another Biosphere calling card) intersect haphazardly in midair—not unlike the way the tapestry of a region’s frog calls shifts as different species emerge from hibernation.
Chiu and Honer’s creative practice is far from haphazard—one look at Chiu’s modular synthesizer rigs, hooked up with cables in all colors of the rainbow, will tell you as much—but in making Different Rooms, the musicians strove to invite randomness into the studio. The duo typically records its free-flowing live shows to separate tracks, yielding raw material for later creations. With a full library of stems at their disposal, they ran improvisatory sessions with L.A. guitarist Jeff Parker and saxophonist Josh Johnson, who plays in Parker’s IVtet and Chiu’s jazz ensemble SML. Through the magic of tape manipulation, Johnson’s reedy tenor travels across space and time to duet with opera singer Giovanna Jacques on the album’s title track, which for its duration sustains the tense thrill of an orchestral warmup.
Different Rooms’ greatest coup—and what sets it apart from Honer and Chiu’s previous collaborations—is its command of form. The whole album speaks in parallel. “Before and After Signs” and “Different Rooms” form a towering monolith at the center, while both “Mean Solar Time” and “Side by Side” are “reflected” in the back half of the tracklist. The latter extracts and loops a single riff—an echo of the celeste motif that anchored Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ Promises—from Parker’s refined noodling, loops it, and spins out a new track. “Mean Solar Time (reflected)” keeps Honer’s viola lines intact, but otherwise flips every convex surface completely concave. Balance in all things: “Mean Solar Time” and its mirror image conclude in nearly identical fashion. Scattered footsteps. Birds chirping. The whoosh of a passing car. What’s taken place between them is not transportive so much as transformative. We’re still in the real world; we have been the whole time.
